Corporate partnerships: the art of not talking about yourself
I've been on the receiving end of quite a few charity partnership pitches. I've seen a lot of cold outreach emails and proposals from charities. They often miss the mark, mainly because they focus on what the charity needs and why it needs it. But as the buyer, I needed to know why my company should be investing in this partnership relative to the other options on the table. Nine times out of ten, I didn’t think the charity had really tried to get to know us or what we were looking for.
When I look back, I don’t think I ever really took the time to try to understand the charity sector and what they were looking for. If I’m honest, I probably displayed a bit of conscious bias. I made assumptions. I definitely didn’t reach out to try to help. But when I left my corporate role and set up Pivot, I really wanted to make sure I tested myself in new areas and generally tried to apply my skills in new ways. And as part of a project working with Pilotlight and Deloitte, I got to do just that.
During the first phase of the project I spent time speaking with charity leaders, trying to understand the challenge from their perspective. Across about fifteen interviews, with organisations ranging from small community charities to national bodies and well-known cultural institutions, I heard so many interesting and different perspectives on how they had tried to partner with corporates. And it opened my eyes to both their challenges and the opportunity that exists.
Why corporate partnerships?
According to the Charities Aid Foundation's UK Giving Report, the proportion of people donating to charity has fallen to its lowest level since records began in 2016, with around four million fewer donors compared to 2019. Government grants have declined by around £1 billion annually in real terms since 2020. And the competition for what grant funding remains has intensified significantly. The Association of Charitable Foundations reported that applications to some foundations have doubled, with overall application volumes rising by 30 to 50% while available funding has stayed largely flat.
In that context, growing corporate partnership income has become a more urgent priority for many charities. And there are some incredible examples of corporate/charity partnership. M&S and Breast Cancer Now is a great case study - M&S is famous for its underwear, so a partnership with Breast Cancer Now makes strategic sense. For the charity, the bra fitting is a perfect place to provide information on how to perform self-exams and access to NHS screening. The partnership has even inspired the development of a post-surgery bra. M&S raises money for Breast Cancer Now and it brings its skills, its reach and its brand to the party too.
At the smaller end of the scale is the Sleep Charity. Good sleep is essential for health and wellbeing, and their mission is to help the nation sleep better, so the Sleep Charity has created partnerships with mission-aligned companies that sell beds, bedding, pyjamas, sleep socks and more - companies whose commercial offer directly connects to their mission.
But corporate partnerships are a different proposition from other forms of fundraising and if they’re not carefully managed they can create more work than they generate in value. Most mid-sized charities are not set up to manage the bespoke nature of corporate fundraising. And then once you land a partnership, the demands of the corporate can outweigh the benefit. Volunteering days that require significant management time (particularly where the volunteering is not directly connected to what the charity does) can absorb resource without meaningfully advancing the mission. Brand associations need constant feeding. Bespoke programmes shaped entirely around what the corporate wants can pull a charity away from its core offer. If the partnership is not carefully structured, the charity ends up investing heavily in a relationship that is not funding the things that matter most.
What corporates are (normally) looking for
So what makes a partnership work for both parties? Corporates are looking for strategic alignment between their business priorities and a charity's mission and assets. Social value they can demonstrate to clients, employees, and in their supply chains. Skills and expertise they can deploy meaningfully. Access to communities they would not otherwise reach. In some cases, brand association with something that carries authenticity in a way conventional marketing cannot replicate.
A corporate is also not one thing. The CSR team has different goals from the marketing team, which has different goals from the procurement team, which has different goals from HR. A charity that can build a proposition relevant to more than one of those agendas has a significantly larger opportunity than one pitching exclusively to the charitable giving budget.
The undiscovered value in corporate partnerships
One thing I took from the research was a clearer picture of how much value sits undeveloped in most charities. Assets that are either not recognised as valuable, or recognised but not properly packaged for a corporate buyer.
Almost every charity has something a corporate cannot easily buy elsewhere. A community a corporate wants to reach or a trusted voice with an audience that is hard to access. An event with genuine emotional resonanc or maybe a programme that can be shaped around a corporate's social value objectives.
Some of the organisations I spoke with had already begun to think laterally about this. A cultural institution had moved well beyond ticket sponsorship into content licensing, brand partnerships, and co-created marketing programmes with companies whose audiences overlapped with theirs. The return on those relationships was significantly higher than traditional corporate membership, and the partnerships were more durable because both sides had something real at stake.
Others had assets with clear commercial potential that had not been developed with a corporate audience in mind. The shift required is a change in how the asset is described, who it is described to, and what value is claimed for it. Someone needs to look at what the charity has built and ask: what could this be worth to a business both now and in the future, and who in that business would see it that way?
Where the opportunity is
The charities I spoke with that had built the strongest corporate partnerships had a clear, consistent offer. They understood their assets and could articulate their value in terms a corporate would recognise. They had thought about which parts of a corporate's agenda their work could speak to. And they knew they were offering something genuinely valuable. Charities that approached conversations with confidence, rather than gratitude, tended to build relationships that lasted.
The art of corporate partnerships
There are businesses that specialise in helping charities build stronger corporate partnerships. Remarkable Partnerships was one that came up more than once in my conversations.
Cost is a constraint for many charities, which is why the Pilotlight model is worth knowing about. Together with Deloitte, we created a volunteer-led, skills-based workshop called Partnership Pathway that helps charities define their corporate partnership offer.
Time is also a constraint. The more manual aspects of the work, lead research, tailored outreach, proposition building, are also areas where AI can genuinely help. I've been prototyping this for a while now and it has real potential to free up the capacity that most charities simply don't have.
But none of that replaces the more fundamental shift. The charities that pitch well are the ones that have done the work first. Who they're pitching to and what that business actually needs. That is the art of listening…and not talking about yourself.
Pivot Brand and Marketing works with leaders in professional services firms who are building or rebuilding their marketing function. If the thinking in this blog resonates, take a look at how we work or get in touch at hello@pivot-marketing.co.uk.